Dec. 21, 2013

As noted here and here, News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers was among the too-few voices of skepticism about the Little Rascals case. Today Rogers is mostly retired, but he continues to lament the state’s failure to take responsibility for its willful prosecution of seven innocent defendants:

“North Carolina has a sad reputation for misguided justice. There is no better example than the plight of the Edenton Seven. The government destroyed lives and families in its fevered rush to find wrong where there was none.

“It takes political courage to right painful and embarrassing wrongs from 25 years ago. The case of the Edenton Seven offers those who would claim the mantle of leadership in our state an opportunity to demonstrate that they are the kind of people we need in Raleigh.

“Silence in the face of such obvious injustice is cowardice.”

April 22, 2013

“Lecturing recently, I mentioned the American witch-hunts of the 1980s and 1990s. When the audience looked puzzled, I explained that I was referring to the Satanic Panic of those years, the wave of false charges concerning ritual child abuse and devil cults that made regular headlines in the decade after 1984. The explanation helped little.

“Even people who had lived through those years, who had been following the media closely, had precisely no recollection. Lost in memory it may be, but the Satanic Panic needs to be remembered, if only to prevent a renewed outbreak of this horrible farrago. And when better than in the 30th anniversary of the affair’s beginning?

“It all started in southern California, in Manhattan Beach, in the Fall of 1983….”

– From “Remember the Satanic Panic” (Jan. 9, 2013) by Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, on Real Clear Religion

I share Dr. Jenkins’ concern about public memory, of course.

Which are more worrisome – those who have no recollection at all of cases such as McMartin and Little Rascals, or those who have forgotten they all were hoaxes?

Oct. 19, 2011

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003, social psychologist Carol Tavris noted that:

“One mother (in the Little Rascals case) told reporters that it took 10 months before her child was able to ‘reveal’ the molestation.

“No one at the time considered the idea that the child might have been remarkably courageous to persist in telling the truth for so long.”

Sept. 30, 2013

Death noted: District Attorney Frank Parrish, 64, who succeeded H. P. Williams Jr. in prosecuting the Edenton Seven.

By the time Parrish took office in 1994, Little Rascals had become almost entirely a Nancy Lamb production. Whatever Parrish actually believed, the prosecutors’ code demanded that he continue to insist that the case was concrete-solid.

But as a growing body of scientific evidence called into question the testimony of child witnesses in ritual-abuse cases, Parrish had to decide how to respond to the overturning of the convictions of Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson. “I’ve gotten an awful lot of guidance, none of it solicited,” he told the Charlotte Observer. “(Research) does not play a part, nor should it. That’s as if because there’s research about the unreliability of eyewitnesses, I should dismiss or not retry an armed robber.”

By 1997 Parrish and Lamb could no longer delay dropping the last Little Rascals charges. And who now might succeed Parrish as district attorney? Unfortunately, you won’t be surprised.